30 October, 2012

Advanced Diagnosis for Sustainable Flight Guidance and Control: the European Framework 7 Project ADDSAFE has been finalised

A research consortium of 8 European partners from industry (Airbus, Deimos Space), research establishments (DLR, MTA SZTAKI) and Universities (Bordeaux, Delft, Hull, Leicester) was established in July 2009 funding by the 7th Framework Program of the EC to address the challenge of the future sustainable aircraft: to be cleaner, quieter, smarter and more affordable. The project was led by Deimos Space and named “Advanced Fault Diagnosis for Sustainable Flight Guidance and Control (in its short acronym: ADDSAFE). The project objective was to contribute to the future aircraft initiative through the development of advanced Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) techniques that can be applied in the Flight Control System (FCS) of the aircraft. More precisely, it was demonstrated that improving the fault diagnosis performance in the FCS allows the optimization of the aircraft structural design, resulting in weight and energy saving, which in turn helps to improve the aircraft performance and to decrease its environmental footprint (e.g. fuel consumption and noise). The FDD challenge tackled by ADDSAFE contained sensor and actuator malfunction detections. The importance of the project results has been well demonstrated by the industrial-grade assessment and validation techniques carried out by the joint actions of Deimos and Airbus. The project was closed in October 2012 with a demonstration of the most representative designs using the facilities of the actual Airbus flight control system V&V test benches in Toulouse. During the project the team of MTA SZTAKI including József Bokor, András Edelmayer, Zoltán Szabó and Bálint Vanek developed two advanced FDD methods, one based on aircraft level mathematical model and another using the local actuator component level description. After a rigorous technology evaluation process carried out by the industrial partners the design of SZTAKI was selected for implementation in the real flight control computers of the aircraft. Based on the successful evaluation Airbus is further considering the use and development of these FDD techniques, using its internal funding sources, in close cooperation with SZTAKI in order to show the applicability of the proposed schemes for future generation aircrafts.